Wednesday, October 21, 2009

This beautiful necklace is the last update in the shop for the next 2 weeks. As of tomorrow the shop will on vacation mode while I help with a Halloween night at my old museum and visit my parents- so if you want anything in the sparrowsalvage store (or any of my shops) you'd better get in quick! Of course if your budget doesn't stretch right now, just load up on your favourites (Etsy is now giving us access to favourite listings in vacation-bound shops, hooray!) and shoot me a convo and I'll reserve whatever it is you want. I'll still be checking my emails every couple of days while I'm away and of course I'll let you all know when I'm back!

Also, there was a comment in the last entry by the colour-lovin' Chrissy that there's a Firefox add-on called FireShot, which allows you to capture webpages, either the part you can see or the whole lot at once. The capture can then be used in Photoshop or anywhere on your computer like a regular image.

Tuesday, October 20, 2009

I'm quite enjoying this new instructional vibe I've got going on, so today as well as showing you a stunning treasury, I'm also going to show you exactly how to get capped images of a treasury using Photoshop! I've tried to make the instructions simple, bearing in mind that most of you probably have only used Photoshop for improving your images.

Okay- so the first thing you do is open the page with your treasury- you'll notice there's a button on your keyboard that says 'print screen'- hit that. Now go to Photoshop, open a new canvas (File>New) -when the prompt comes up make sure it says 'clipboard' in the preset bar, then click OK.

Now paste your printscreen cap into the canvas by either holding down Control and presing 'V', or go to Edit>Paste.

Pretty spiffy huh? Well hold on to your pants, it gets better. Go to your tools palette and select the marquee tool, the one that looks like a dotted square:

Now click on the canvas and drag to create a square the same size as the treasury area you can see. (I know you can't see all of it right now, don't worry!) You can move the dotted lines by putting your mouse inside it and click-dragging it till it lines up.

Now go to Select>Inverse. This will flip the dotted line. Now go to Edit>clear. Everything but your treasury selection will disspear. Good huh?

Okay, now we're going to move that piece of treasury so there's room for the bottom half, so go to Edit>Rotate canvas> '90 CCW'. Now go to Edit>Transform>Rotate 90 CW'.

Now go to your tools palette again- there's a black arrow with an ornate plus sign (called the 'move tool') next to the marquee square:

Select the move arrow, then click-and-drag on the image in your canvas to bring it up to the top of the canvas. Now you should have this:

Nifty! Now go back to the treasury page on the internet and scroll down a bit so you can see the rest of the treasury, making sure you can see a little bit of what you've already captured. Hit print screen and follow the above steps again to clear out the unwanted stuff and rotate the image. Now move it till it's under the first piece, so they match up.

You might find it hard to match it up, so here's a tip- go to your layers palette (the little window on your right- if it's not there just hit F7 or go to Window>Layers, and it should pop up. Where there's a little drop down that says 'opacity', hit that and slide the slider to about 70%. Now click-hold-and-drag until it's layered over the other piece and lines up perfectly. If you're finding it hard to get a steady hand to lay it perfectly, you can get close and then use the arrows on your keyboard to nudge it till it's in place.

Now you've done that, bring your opacity back up to 100% and you can see a complete treasury. Wow! Well hang on, tiger- we need to stick it all together. First thing, go to Layer>Flatten image, and it will compact everything nicely. Now go to your crop tool- this little feller is in your tools palette, he looks like this:

Select that tool, then go to your canvas and click-and-drag till you have a border around your image, like this:

You can use the tiny squares to latch on and drag the dimensions around, so you can get it perfectly neat. Now hit enter- the whole piece will crop, and you'll get yourself a lovely whole treasury!

Monday, October 19, 2009

Female Tusken raider. You'd know the Tusken better as 'sand people' - I have a childhood rooted fear of the sandpeople, it took me a few minutes to get up the moxy to stand near them! I love the headdress detailing on this costume though, the metalwork contrasting with the rough linen- genius.

A Wookiee! So tall. Seriously- t.a.l.l. I love tall people/giant creatures, but this guy was about 8 foot tall. I literally stood there with my mouth open. This is a chest piece on the Wookiee, it's around eye height. :D

If I have to tell you what this uniform is, you shouldn't be on the internet. :D

I can't help it- when I look at these things, all I want to do is grab a whole bunch of model kits and put together my own. As it is, I'm wondering how I can incorporate this into my jewelry work.

Thursday, October 8, 2009

Sometimes it's so wonderful- all this stuff I've accumulated around me. I forget the millions of secret histories whispering across my desk, then I lay eyes on the spidery '1853' on the back of this tintype, and I touch my fingers to my Georgian heart necklace around my neck, and I think...how marvellous, all these tiny inconsequential things are, to have existed in our world for so long and to have come down to me. For me to find them sometimes in the bottom of old jewellery boxes, jammed in the cracks of dresser drawers, hung with dime store plastic horrors in the thrift shop, slipped between the wall and the fire mantel...waiting.

Friday, October 2, 2009

I've been working on some photos in the shop, re-taking some of the duds and brightening things up a little. I've also been busy in the studio- working on two custom orders and a wholesale lot, and do you know? In between all that I still manage to fit in doing some clothes. I've made an amazing shawl, a couple of pairs of socks and a blouse- I'm not really happy with the blouse though...it's very simple and minimalist.

What would you prefer in my clothing range? Simple, not too fussy -almost primitive- things, or a replication of my earlier cuffs with lots of doilies, buttons, sequins etc?

Hey that's me!

The Sparrow

I'm Penny, I'm nearly 41 and I'm a photographer, vintage dealer and ideas machine. I blog about vintage, give you business tutorials to help you be creative and successful, take nice photos, go antiquing, bake cakes and indulge in general girlish fancies. I'm saving all my money to move to the UK!